Wings of Madness; Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight.
Pul Hoffman.
Harper Perennial. 372 pages.

When I was an undergraduate I used to enjoy going through the back issues of the old Century Magazine. Century was a clearing house for the whole intellectual and cultural complex of Anglo-Saxon Victorian life. Most fascinating for me were the illustrations of the marvels of the world, including the wonders of developing technology. It is in the pages of Century Magazine that I first ran across the famous picture of Tesla calmly sitting among the crash and thunder of the artifical lightning he’d generated through one of his massive coils; and it was in Century that I first saw the diminuative Alberto Santos-Dumont, sitting beneath the huge envelope of airship no. 6 on his way to circle the Eiffel Tower.

Santoas-Dumont is a kind of dead-end in the history of modern flight. Though he was hailed as a great inventor and a pioneer of the air in his time, he was soon surpassed by the Wrights, the Curtises and the hundreds of others that followed. But for a time–between 1898 and 1906–Santos-Dumont was the subject of the adoration of the masses. Children played with toy Santos-Dumont airships, and Parisian women wore Santos-Dumont hats. He was photographed, lionized, feted by Kings, and secretly lusted after by many fair ladies, but he remained remote, self-contained, beyond it all. Indeed this brave man, who looked death squarely in the face and knew just what to do when the gas expanded too much in the warm upper reaches of the air and burst the silken envelope of his balloon, or when tumbling 100 feet to the earth trapped in the wreckage of his Demoiselle monoplane, was by all accounts Gay. Just as Tesla and other Gay men and women of the time, Santos-Dumont chose to maintain an ambiguous personal life.

However, his style of dress–he was the first civilian male to wear a wrist watch, for instance–his bravery, and the boldness of his designs attracted the admiration of thousands, including Thomas Edison, Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, and James Pierpont Langley–the director of the Smithsonian and the inventor of a failed monoplane.

Who dared say that man had not yet tamed the air ways by 1903? Santos-Dumont, the diminuative, independently wealthy Brazilian, already had in his airship no. 9–the personal airship that he used to fly about Paris in, stopping at his favorite bars for a drink, or dining at Maxim’s with his friends, while the doorman held the mooring rope outside!

No doubt Santos-Dumont was a genius, but a genius prone to depression and inexplicable acts of self-abnegation. Though he was the first person to fly in Europe, he soon recognized that the Wrights had flown earlier and in a better designed version of a heavier-than-air craft. After that he began to live alone and sometimes to check himsef into mental hospitals where he refused to see family and friends. World War I convinced him that the world had perverted “his” invention–which he had intended only as a defensive weapon, if a weapon at all. Finally, in 1932, the former hero of the air hung himself.

Santos-Dumont loved turn-of-the-century Paris and there he flew above the heads of Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Alfred Jarry and Jack Johnson. That time is as distant to us as the Pre-Cambrian, and, like the Pre-Cambrian filled with fantastic forms of life that come down to us in old images and in the fossils of thoughts–the pages of books. Some continue to speak to us, while some remain as a foot-note at the very bottom of a crumbling page. Paul Hoffman rescues Santos Dumont for English readers, and gives him to us decked out in superb sentences and finely tailored paragraphs. In Brazil, however, the intrepid aeronaut has never been forgotten and to this day one may see his heart at the air-force academy in Campo dos Afonsos, on the outskirts of Rio.

I highly recommend this book.